Solace
Regular price $18.95The poems in the collection were written within one year when the pandemic ruled our lives by forcing us into isolation. In hope of maintaining a semblance of reality, the poet is compelled to inhabit imaginative space, focusing on specific images generated by everyday life. The poems become her companions and through writing them, she finds relief in pain and grief. The book Solace is a quest to find consolation, and to speak on behalf of people, who although overwhelmed by human limitations, search for something tangible which can restore their peace of mind in turbulent times.
At the End, Beginnings
Regular price $18.95In this first book by Christopher Lawrence Menard, the poet paints a picture of what it means to be a son, a brother, a husband and a father, even as his own father begins to succumb to the diseases he has battled for years. John B. Lee, the renowned Canadian poet, describes Menard’s tribute to family life as “a love story,” and says. “the love of life is life itself.” In this collection of poems, Menard reflects both on the man who shaped him and the man he became, as well as the boy he is helping to guide.
Word Problems
Regular price $21.95From Ian Williams, author of Reproduction, winner of the Giller Prize and a June 2020 Indie Next Great Read
Frustrated by how tough the issues of our time are to solve – racial inequality, our pernicious depression, the troubled relationships we have with other people – Ian Williams revisits the seemingly simple questions of grade school for inspiration: if Billy has five nickels and Jane has three dimes, how many Black men will be murdered by police? He finds no satisfaction, realizing that maybe there are no easy answers to ineffable questions.
Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. Two long poems cut through the text like vibrating bass notes, curiosities circle endlessly, and microaggressions spin into lyric. And all done with a light touch and a joyful sense of humour.
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Ian Williams is the author of the Giller Prize-winning novel Reproduction . His last poetry collection Personals was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award. His short story collection, Not Anyone's Anything, won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada. His first book, You Know Who You Are, was a finalist for the ReLit Poetry Prize. Williams holds a Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and is currently an assistant professor of poetry in the Creative Writing program at the University of British Columbia. He was the 2014-2015 Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. Ian Williams currently resides in Vancouver, BC.
